Google CEO Larry Page made a somewhat rare public appearance this week speaking with CBS’s Charlie Rose at the TED ideas conference in Vancouver. During the conversation, Page expressed his ‘tremendous’ disappointment in the government using the NSA to conduct surveillance in secret and how that affects democracy. He noted the importance of having a conversation about privacy and democracy as Google tries to protect its users’ privacy as we share more and more information. (Video below) expand full story

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shocked Charlie Rose on Cyber Monday Eve (great timing for the PR-savvy retail giant) by showing him the future of delivery services – autonomous drones that will pick up and deliver wares from fulfillment centers. From which we can conclude that Charlie Rose doesn’t read 9to5Google, where the concept is old news.

9to5Google also heard this service was coming, and we have some more somewhat wild information on the program. Google, in the long run, plans to use self-driving cars and flying drones as means of delivery. We also heard Google’s delivery project came from the Google X incubator headed by cofounder Sergey Brin.

Clearly there are a lot of hurdles to jump on the way to this vision (privacy, theft, accidents, visual pollution, etc, etc). but it’s equally clear that these two Silicon Valley heavy-weights are prepping to battle in the skies above.

Google might have gotten there first, but Amazon definitely wins the PR battle so far: a short concept video for a service which doesn’t yet exist, and which even optimistically it doesn’t expect to launch for a couple of years, got everyone talking about them. Including Charlie Rose. Video below …

Larry Ellison is apparently still smarting from the court battle he lost back in May of last year when he accused Google of copyright infringement over its use of Java in Android, lost and ended up paying Google’s $4M court costs.

Oracle bought Java from Sun Microsystems, and claimed ownership of some of the code used by Google. Google argued that the small amount of replicated code was ‘fair use’ and that the rest of it was coded from scratch simply using similar approaches to Java. Oracle lost.

In an interview with CBS’s Charlie Rose, transcribed in Business Insider, Ellison accuses Page of violating Google’s company slogan, Don’t be evil. Transcript below the fold … expand full story

Google’s CEO Larry Page went on the “Charlie Rose” show via PBS last night to discuss an array of topics, but he also made sure to scold newly-public Facebook in regards to users’ data.

According to Venture Beat, Page well-wished Facebook on its IPO, and then he jumped to, “I think it’s been unfortunate that Facebook has been pretty closed with their data.” He also mentioned Google’s openness, and he subsequently criticized Facebook for lacking the ability to import Google contacts when joining the world-popular social network:

“From a user’s perspective, you say, ‘I’m joining Facebook. I want my contacts.’ In Google, we said, ‘Fine. You can get them from Google.’ And the issue we had is that then Facebook said, ‘No, Google, you can’t do the reverse.’ And so we just said, ‘Well, users don’t understand what they’re doing. They’re putting data in, and they don’t understand they can’t take it out.’ So we said, ‘Well, we’ll only participate with people who have reciprocity. And we’re still waiting.'”

Long story short: Google wants to share its users’ contacts with Facebook—if Facebook does the same with Google.

“You don’t want to be holding your users hostage […] We think it’s important that you as users of Google can take your data, and take it out if you need to, or take it somewhere else,” Page added.